Skip to main content

How What You Buy Can Change The World with Leila Janah

Lesson 173 from: The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show

Chase Jarvis

How What You Buy Can Change The World with Leila Janah

Lesson 173 from: The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show

Chase Jarvis

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

173. How What You Buy Can Change The World with Leila Janah

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

How to Find Your Purpose Through Grief and Loss with Tunde Oyeneyin

48:49
2

What is the Meaning of Life? with Tony Nader

1:17:18
3

Weirdness is the Key to Self Improvement with Marcus Buckingham

1:10:59
4

How to Unlock the Key to Continuous Innovation with Tony Fadell

41:57
5

Talent is Bullsh*t with Steven Pressfield

1:06:26
6

Finding Self When No One Is Looking with Jason Reynolds

59:50
7

Does Cold Water Exposure Really Have Scientific Backing with Dr. Mark Harper

56:15
8

Heal Your Past with Sheleana Aiyana

51:06
9

How An Unconventional Path Got Nabil Ayers To President Of One Of The Most Influential Music Labels

1:04:12
10

All the Hacks to Maximize Your Life with Chris Hutchins

1:08:02
11

Happiness is an Inside Job with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

1:19:58
12

The Power of Regret with Daniel Pink

49:35
13

Data-Driven Life Decisions with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

1:01:26
14

Escape Purgatory of the Mundane With Radical Confidence with Lisa Bilyeu

1:09:58
15

Transform the Quality of Your Life with Tony Robbins

51:37
16

Strengthen Your Intuition & Unlock Your Inner Wisdom with Amber Rae

1:00:13
17

Make Your Message Heard with Victoria Wellman

1:13:34
18

Susan Cain: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

1:09:31
19

Can Food Turn Us Into Geniuses with Max Lugavere

1:21:16
20

Peace Is a Practice with Morgan Harper Nichols

1:14:56
21

Creativity Hates Complacency with Maria Brito

1:10:34
22

A Love Letter to Human Potential with Kate Robinson

54:14
23

How to Build Confidence and Be More Social with Vanessa Van Edwards

1:01:21
24

Trauma Is Wreaking Havoc On Our Lives with Gabby Bernstein

51:59
25

Take The Leap, Start a Business with Payal Kadakia

58:37
26

What Every Creator Should Know About NFTs with Tom Bilyeu

1:05:47
27

40 Seconds To Fame Or Failure with Apolo Ohno

45:52
28

Unlock the Power of Nonverbal Communication with Joe Navarro

1:03:28
29

Living Shouldn't Hurt with Aaron Alexander

1:20:24
30

Ego, Disrupted. How Buddhist Wisdom Meets Western Therapy with Dr. Mark Epstein

1:11:55
31

Words Can Take You Anywhere with Arianna Davis

53:00
32

Master Your Inner Voice with Dr. Ethan Kross

1:06:21
33

Accelerating 10,000 Hours to Mastery with James Altucher

1:09:49
34

Transform Your Mind in 12 Minutes a Day with Dr. Amishi Jha

1:15:57
35

Powerful Habits to Ease Anxiety and Boost Productivity with Mel Robbins

1:15:17
36

The Art of Self-Reinvention with Malcolm Gladwell

1:00:45
37

Creative Acts of Curious People with Sarah Stein Greenberg

1:10:01
38

Self-Discovery, Activism, and Rock & Roll with Stevie Van Zandt

57:56
39

Why Design Matters with Debbie Millman

1:07:04
40

Discover Work that Makes You Come Alive with Jonathan Fields

1:15:34
41

Releasing Trauma and Mastering Your Emotions with Jason Wilson

1:05:35
42

Food Saved Me with Danielle Walker

47:16
43

Changing Our Relationship with Rest with Chelsea Jackson Roberts

49:11
44

Retracing Passion to Build Lasting Career Success with Chris Bosh

54:27
45

Old School Photography + Other Musings with Kai Wong

41:52
46

Escalate and Evolve: A Blueprint for Career and Life with Ben Uyeda

1:08:44
47

The Stories That Hold Us Back with Jon Acuff

1:07:22
48

Poetry, Vulnerability and Finding Your Voice with Jericho Brown

1:13:40
49

What Does it Take to be Backable with Suneel Gupta

1:05:38
50

Unlocking Creativity, Courage and Success with Rebecca Minkoff

53:00
51

How To Heal From Your Past with Dr. Nicole LePera

1:13:54
52

That Will Never Work with Marc Randolph

1:12:06
53

The Real Cost of Your Dream Life with Rachel Rodgers

1:02:44
54

Your Network is Your Insurance Policy with Jordan Harbinger

1:24:15
55

Dream First, Details Later with Ellen Bennett

1:14:45
56

We're Never Going Back with Harley Finkelstein

1:01:47
57

How to Shatter Limitations and Achieve Your Dreams with Steven Kotler

1:08:10
58

The Creative Art of Attention with Julia Cameron

1:05:23
59

The Path Back to True Self with Martha Beck

59:45
60

Upgrade Your Brain and Learn Anything Quickly with Jim Kwik

1:21:22
61

The Urgent Need for Stoicism with Ryan Holiday

1:11:30
62

Delicious Food Doesn't Have to be Complicated with Julia Turshen

1:14:35
63

Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention with Erin Meyer

56:27
64

Stop Living On Autopilot with Antonio Neves

1:07:38
65

How to Tackle Fear and Live Boldly with Luvvie Ajayi Jones

59:42
66

Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable with Jamie Kern Lima

1:05:03
67

Hard Work + The Evolution of Self with Priyanka Chopra Jonas

36:36
68

The Power of Idealism with Samantha Power

1:34:35
69

Pushing the Limits with Extreme Explorer Mike Horn

1:22:54
70

Fast This Way with Dave Asprey

1:15:34
71

Uncomfortable Conversations with Emmanuel Acho

45:59
72

Why Conversation Matters with Rich Roll

1:24:17
73

Elevating Humanity Through Business with John Mackey

1:15:14
74

When Preparation Meets Opportunity with Paul Ninson

1:04:14
75

The Art of Practice with Christoph Niemann

1:12:18
76

Matthew McConaughey: Embracing Resistance & Catching Greenlights

1:19:38
77

Starve the Ego, Feed the Soul with Justin Boreta

1:25:32
78

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results with James Clear

1:20:55
79

Badass Habits and Making Them Stick with Jen Sincero

1:06:12
80

Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

1:09:18
81

Imposter Syndrome, Getting Unstuck and The Practice with Seth Godin

1:13:19
82

The Art of Curiosity and Lifelong Wisdom with Chip Conley

58:47
83

The Lost Art of Breath with James Nestor

1:03:15
84

The Art of Reinvention with Sophia Amoruso

1:03:59
85

Harness Kindness as Your Hidden Super Power with Adrienne Bankert

1:08:26
86

Heal the Soul, Restore the Calm with Stephan Moccio

1:28:19
87

Finding Resilience & Possibility with Guy Raz

1:08:47
88

Truth, Fear, and How to do Better with Luvvie Ajayi Jones

1:18:22
89

The Future is Faster Than You Think with Peter Diamandis

57:56
90

Music, Writing, and Time For Change with Nabil Ayers

1:20:38
91

Freedom to Express Who We Are with Shantell Martin

1:10:34
92

So You Want to Talk about Race with Ijeoma Oluo

1:10:47
93

Photographing History with Pete Souza

1:16:35
94

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone with Lori Gottlieb

58:51
95

Never Settle with Mario Armstrong

1:38:11
96

The Science of Making Work Not Suck with Adam Grant

1:15:36
97

Street Photography + Capturing Truth with Steve John Irby

1:10:54
98

Life, Writing, and Real Talk with Roxane Gay

1:05:57
99

Steve Aoki: Creativity, Community and No Days Off

50:57
100

The Power of Passion and Perseverance with Angela Duckworth

1:08:25
101

Know What Drives You with Michael Gervais

1:05:20
102

The Code of the Extraordinary Mind with Vishen Lakhiani

59:07
103

Risk, Fear, and the Art of Chill with Jimmy Chin

1:13:51
104

Personal Growth and Understanding with Citizen Cope

1:16:21
105

Living Life on Purpose with Jay Shetty

1:20:06
106

Get Out of Your Own Way with Dave Hollis

1:08:10
107

Hope in A Sea of Endless Calamity with Mark Manson

1:15:12
108

How to Find Yourself with Glennon Doyle

1:10:16
109

Make It Til You Make It with Owen Smith

1:20:50
110

Surf, Survival, and Life on the Road with Ben Moon

1:08:01
111

Create the Change You Seek with Jonah Berger

1:00:22
112

Workplace Revolution with Amy Nelson

1:05:16
113

Rethink Impossible with Colin O'Brady

1:29:31
114

Good Enough is Never Good Enough with Corey Rich

1:25:24
115

Say Yes To What You Want with Chris Burkard

1:22:54
116

Finding Stillness In A Fast Paced World with Ryan Holiday

1:08:00
117

Everything is Figureoutable with Marie Forleo

43:50
118

The Art of Being Yourself with Elizabeth Gilbert

53:41
119

Creativity, Comedy, and Never Settling with Nate Bargatze

1:37:12
120

Personal + Career Reinvention with Jasmine Star

1:01:18
121

Stay Creative, Focused and True to Yourself with Austin Kleon

1:12:25
122

Ramit Sethi 'I Will Teach You To Be Rich' book launch with Chase Jarvis

1:07:17
123

You Don't Need to Be Rich to Live Rich with David Bach

1:09:51
124

Harnessing Your Human Nature for Success with Robert Greene

1:04:28
125

Addiction, Reinvention, and Finding Ultra with Endurance Athlete Rich Roll

1:07:41
126

Disruption, Reinvention, and Reimagining Silicon Valley with Arlan Hamilton

1:12:31
127

The Intersection of Art and Service with Rainn Wilson

1:03:25
128

Your Mind Can Transform Your Life with Tom Bilyeu

1:30:19
129

Do Something Different with Jason Mesnick

1:02:38
130

Less Phone, More Human with Dan Schawbel

1:07:40
131

Startup to $15 Billion: Finding Your Life's Work with Shopify's Harley Finkelstein

1:12:42
132

It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work with Jason Fried

1:49:02
133

Love, Service, and Living Your Truth with Danielle LaPorte

1:11:05
134

How to Do Work That Matters for People Who Care with Seth Godin

1:10:56
135

Happiness Through Gratitude with AJ Jacobs

1:12:54
136

You Are Your Habits with Julien Smith

1:03:40
137

Maximizing Creativity + Navigating the Messy Middle with Scott Belsky

1:09:10
138

The Most Important Conversation About Life… Death with Michael Hebb

1:13:38
139

Redemption and a Thirst for Change with Scott Harrison

54:58
140

Imagination and The Power of Change with Beth Comstock

1:12:29
141

Success, Community, and his cameo in Parks & Recreation with NBA All Star Detlef Schrempf

1:02:02
142

1,000 Paths to Success with Jack Conte

1:07:32
143

Unconventional Ways to Win with Rand Fishkin

1:37:49
144

How to Sell Without Selling Out with Ryan Carson

1:05:45
145

Be the Artist You Want to Work With with Nigel Barker

47:12
146

Your Story Is Your Power with Elle Luna

1:33:53
147

Celebrating Your Weirdness with Thomas Middleditch

1:14:04
148

Persevering Through Failure with Melissa Arnot Reid

1:33:23
149

Go Against the Grain with David Heinemeier Hansson

1:18:07
150

Stamina, Tenacity and Craft with Eugene Mirman

1:17:15
151

Create Work That Lasts with Todd Henry

1:06:50
152

Make Fear Your Friend

08:08
153

Tame Your Distracted Mind with Adam Gazzaley

1:12:08
154

Why Grit, Persistence, and Hard Work Matter with Daymond John

1:05:15
155

How to Launch Your Next Project with Product Hunts with Ryan Hoover

1:11:15
156

Lessons in Business and Life with Richard Branson

45:05
157

Embracing Your Messy Beautiful Life with Glennon Doyle

1:27:29
158

How to Create Work That Lasts with Ryan Holiday

1:20:25
159

5 Seconds to Change Your Life with Mel Robbins

1:14:53
160

Break Through Anxiety and Stress Through Play with Charlie Hoehn

1:08:10
161

The Quest For True Belonging with Brene Brown

1:29:41
162

Real Artists Don't Starve with Jeff Goins

1:19:16
163

Habits for Ultra-Productivity with Jessica Hische

56:18
164

Using Constraints to Fuel Your Best Work Ever with Scott Belsky

1:21:07
165

The Intersection of Art and Business with AirBnB's Joe Gebbia

1:19:56
166

Build a World-Changing Business with Reid Hoffman

1:19:31
167

How Design Drives The World's Best Companies with Robert Brunner

1:05:33
168

Why Creativity Is The Key To Leadership with Sen. Cory Booker

53:06
169

How To Change The Lives Of Millions with Scott Harrison

1:16:14
170

How To Build A Media Juggernaut with Piera Gelardi

1:21:04
171

Transform Your Consciousness with Jason Silva

1:08:02
172

The Formula For Peak Performance with Steven Kotler

1:01:40
173

How What You Buy Can Change The World with Leila Janah

1:04:10
174

Overcoming Fear & Self-Doubt with W. Kamau Bell

47:44
175

The Unfiltered Truth About Entrepreneurship with Adam Braun

1:21:36
176

Build + Sustain A Career Doing What You Love with James Mercer of The Shins

51:58
177

How Design Can Supercharge Your Business with Yves BĂ©har

33:40
178

Conquer Fear & Self-Doubt with Amanda Crew

1:29:39
179

Become A Master Communicator with Vanessa Van Edwards

1:19:52
180

How iJustine Built Her Digital Empire with iJustine

1:08:05
181

How To Be A World-Class Creative Pro with Joe McNally

1:05:19
182

How To Stop Waiting And Start Doing with Roman Mars

43:43
183

Gut, Head + Heart Alignment with Scott Dadich

38:17
184

If Not Now, When? with Debbie Millman

55:31

Lesson Info

How What You Buy Can Change The World with Leila Janah

Hey everybody, how's it goin'? I'm Chase Jarvis. Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show here on CreativeLive. You know this show. This is where I sit down with the world's top creators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders, and I do my best to unpack actionable and valuable insights, with the goal of helping you live your dreams, in career, in hobby, and in life. My guest today started out as an investment banker slash management consultant, then founded Samasource, which helps poor people, or people in poor countries, make money and get out of that poverty. And then, started a luxury make-up brand. This is a crazy story, that's sourced from those same countries, and is sold in Sephora stores worldwide, QVC, we'll get into that. She's just about to launch a New York Times bestselling book, I'm predicting a New York Times bestseller. She was featured yesterday in the New York Times, are you guys ready for this one? Drum roll, please. (drum roll) Leila Janah, yay! (upbeat...

music) Every time I see you, this has been a long time coming. I know. I've wanted to have you on the show for literally, like years, and we just bumped into each other, and you said, "Oh my God, I would love to do that!" "It would be fun!" I said, "I'm gonna own it." I'm gonna text you, we're gonna make it happen, and here we are. And we did, and I'm so honored to be here, thank you. I'm not worthy of that introduction though. Thank you. You crush so hard. I love, I am glad that we're together in San Francisco, and B, holy smokes, big article in the New York Time yesterday. Was it yesterday or the day before? Sunday, it was in the Sunday Times. Sunday? Sunday Times, and today is Wednesday, so three days ago, my time flies. Congratulations. Thanks. God. Thanks. But you know the PR is only the nice veneer on the real story. It's the veneer. Right? It is. That's the veneer, and that's what this show, you guys know that, that's what this show's all about. So we're gonna get into it. Maybe ... Okay, I just gave a little bit of a history. I know you mostly through Samasource. Tim Ferriss introduced us. You were on CreativeLive with his show, his four-hour live show, which is a great class. That was before we we recruited him to come to Africa. He actually saw our work, in action, in Kenya. Years ago, he was one of my clients with Samasource. Amazing. Fun Tim Ferriss story. There's so much to talk about, we should get into it. One of the things, I mentioned this before we started recording, that I love, is for people who, there's contrast in their life. You started out goin' one path, and as my friend, Catarina Fake, the founder of Flickr, and advisor to CreativeLive said, "It's never to late to change directions." From management consulting, to founding a what do you call it? Just a non-profit business? Yeah. That gets people that are in low income countries, or poor countries paid? Is that how you do? Give me, in your words, in a very elegant way. Sure. How would you describe Samasource? It's poor people in poor countries, and poor people in the US, so we -- Oh, it is in the US too? Mm hm. I didn't know that. We have a program called Samaschool, that operates in low income communities around the country. We think poverty is an international problem, it's domestic problem, and the issues are really similar. Incredible. So we're called Samasource because sama means equal in Sanskrit. I had worked for different non-profits when I was in college, and this all started because, when I was in high school, I got a scholarship from, of all places, a tobacco company, literally, big tobacco, funded my travel to Africa. I got this scholarship, and I was like, I wanna do something different, I was feeling like I wanted an adventure, and I found a volunteer program to go and volunteer in Africa, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna go and do that, and I'll use this money, and frankly, I wasn't hell-bent on saving the world, I really just wanted to have an adventure and get out of dodge. I did that, I did that in what would have been my second Where was dodge? Semester in college. Where was dodge? Southern California. Southern California, dodge. I mean, it's a pretty great place to be. I was so lucky, I got this scholarship, and I had a great, I went to a really cool math and science magnet school, and I had really supportive teachers, and they were like, okay, you can graduate early, you have enough credits, so just go be off on your merry way. Go do something good for the world. I went to Ghana, in West Africa, of all places. I had no connection there. My parents thought I was a little bit crazy, but I'm grateful they let me go. I showed up there, and I was a volunteer English teacher to about 60 kids, who were blind and partially sighted, in a school in the middle of rural West Africa. I had no idea what I was doing. I basically plagiarized all the lesson plans from my high school English teacher. Luckily, she's real good. She's like, you got this. You got this. Exactly. I started a creative writing program in the school, and I showed up there thinking I would help all of these poor, starving African kids, and I got there, and my students were so bright. I mean, they could name US Senators, they were very up to speed on global politics, they all listened to BBC and Voice of America radio, and the idea that a kid living on less than two dollars a day, in a poor country, could know more about the world than some of my high school peers just blew my mind. I realized that I had absorbed this myth about poverty. That we live in a meritocracy. That if you only are willing to work hard enough, you will escape poverty, and that's just not true. It's heartbreaking. It is, I just felt my heart break when you said that. It sort of like, God, it's just such a reminder. Yeah, it's heartbreaking, and it's unacceptable. It's 2017, there's enough wealth in the world to solve this problem. No one should be living in that kind of desperation. I saw my kids, the people in the school, who would have conditions like Malaria, and not be able to afford a five dollar medication, to fix their Malaria fever. There was a kid who died in our village, of a preventable disease, because his mom didn't have the money. In Ghana, there wasn't enough money for public healthcare, so if you have a traumatic injury, and you go to the hospital, and they don't have enough material for sutures that day, you will die in the hospital. These constantly, seeing these avoidable tragedies, made me aware that poverty is a problem we absolutely have to fix. I think it is the biggest moral problem in our lifetimes. And, it's the root cause of so many problems we try to fix downstream. Whether it's getting access, getting people access to clean water, sanitation, health care, all of these things are basically caused by poverty. If you figure out a way to help people increase their incomes, they solve all of those problems on their own. I learned in Ghana that, I think, the biggest challenge in a lot of these low-income communities, is job creation. So I started thinking, how can I create jobs in a place like my village that I was living in in Ghana? I went and I studied International Development at Harvard. I tried to understand why these people in places were so poor, and I kept coming across this very traditional charity model, of, okay, well, our way to solve the problem is, let's build a well for these poor people. Let's build a school. Let's send their government a lot of money, and hope that the government invests it in the right things. We've invested close to a trillion dollars in aid in Africa, in the last 60 years, and still incomes, for the poorest people, have remained virtually the same. They've not crossed a dollar a day. Why is that? Something in this model's not working. I had that kind of in the background, then I graduated from college, and my parents didn't have much money, and I needed to have a job, so I took a consulting gig. Your parents were first generation? Yeah, I'm first generation, my parents came from India, yeah, in the late '70s. My brother and I basically lived the American Dream. My parents came to the country with two suitcases, and we, through public schools, made it into Harvard and Stanford, and we were just blessed in every way, by this country's opportunities. Maybe because of that, it broke my heart to see kids who were equally talented, not get the same chances. As I studied this problem of poverty more and more, I just realized that our approach to solving it is dead wrong. We are so focused on, basically, giving hand outs in some way. Handouts might make us feel good, as the donor, but they don't solve the core problem. You know? It's like, teach a man to fish, it's the oldest adage, and yet, we don't do that. Anyway, I took this consulting job right after college, 'cause I needed to make some money, and I also wanted to understand how business worked. I had no idea. I mean, I had worked in non-profits, and I studied African economic development, so I had no idea how businesses worked. I got this two year crash course in how to run a business, and how to manage a P&L, and all the things you learn as a consultant, working for big companies. As soon as I could, I quit. I started a business. Got enough money in the bank. I love it, it's a great way to use the system, the traditional system that we're all pressured by, to create, leverage, or catapult for you to go and do something you love. You knew? You knew, when you went in, that this is the goal. I need to go make some money, and create some leverage, and then, I'm gonna get out. I knew that I wanted to address the problem of poverty. I had no idea how. I knew also that the traditional non-profit model didn't seem like it was working. It felt fundamentally disempowering to give handouts to people who actually wanted work. Was it, on both sides, the people that were receiving the handouts. I mean, I'm sure they were grateful to receive the handout, but there was some tainted aspect to it. And our side, too? Was it a two-sided problem? Definitely a two-sided problem. I remember in Ghana, when I came back, I got all of these letters in the mail, these little blue aerograms, written by the friends and family members of my students, 'cause they'd all asked for my address. They'd get their friends to write me these letters, that would be like, "Dear Sister Leila, God bless you," "can you please send me a box of crayons?" I got an ask for a box of water once. I'm like, somebody took the trouble to go and write me a letter. To go buy an aerogram, get a pencil, write a long letter, mail it to the United States, for a box of water? How messed up is this situation? They've been trained to think that the only way that they can get these things is by begging for them. Because there's no economic opportunity. How heartbreaking is that? Someone is industrious enough to go and write me a long letter, which frankly, my parents weren't even doing when I was in Ghana. It just seemed like such a broken system, and I felt like the spirit, and the incredible energy that all of these young people had, in Ghana, was being wasted, because they had no chance to use that to produce income for themselves. Incredible. I also felt like, if those kids had been lucky enough to have the experience that I'd had, and go to good public schools in Southern California, they would be lawyers and doctors, and they would've kicked my butt on the SAT. It just was an accident of birth, that put them there, and me in the US. You cracked the nut, though. You figured out a different way of looking at it. That was one of the things that I was intrigued by, when we first met, because it was so different from all of the other charity work that I had experienced. You know, the traditional ways that you talked about in your long list earlier, about give people this, send over food, dig a well. I think you're right, they do make us feel better, but your approach was radically different. How'd you start? 'Cause you said you didn't know how to start, and I think this is, one of the reasons I wanna ask this question, is because there's so many people at home who, have an idea, or are burning with the same passion that you're burning with to end poverty in your village in Ghana and beyond, and yet, are paralyzed by not knowing what to do, so walk us through that. Sure. Social entrepreneurship is interesting because you're solving, you have to be able to solve two sets of problems. One, is the set of problems that are experienced by the people you wanna help. The second is the set of problems that the business that those people can be involved in can solve, if that makes sense. It's like two layers of problems, right? I knew that the problem I wanted to solve, for people, like the ones I met in Ghana, was poverty, and the way to solve that would be to create employment for them, but I didn't know what kind of employment I could create, that would solve a real market need. So I looked at models like microfinance. Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize in 2006, won it because he figured out that if we could take banking, which has been traditionally very exclusive, poor people don't get access to bank loans, if they don't have a credit history, and banks don't wanna lend tiny amounts to people who repay them on a weekly basis. They were totally cut out, and he realized that if he could loan $200 to a woman in Bangladesh, to start a small tailoring business, or selling tomatoes or produce, she could repay that loan pretty reliably, much more than a traditional bank would ever expect. So he started this whole new model of microkrediet, which took over the world, and served hundreds of millions of people. And brought millions of people out of poverty. I looked at microfinance and I thought, that's really interesting. But the challenge with microfinance is, we give this loan to a small businesswoman in Bangladesh, who is she selling stuff to? She's selling stuff to other poor people. She's locked into a market, where everyone else also makes only two dollars a day. At best, she can sell a few more tomatoes to other poor people. There's a cap on how big her market is. But if instead, you can connect poor people to a global market, that's much bigger, where they can sell to people who are much wealthier, that's how you catapult them out of poverty. So I thought to myself, what is something that I can train someone from a poor place to do, that can actually make them more than two dollars a day? Or three dollars a day? What if I could make them $10 a day? $10 a day in a place like Kenya, where we started, is middle class. That means you can afford three meals a day, good education, health care, clothing, all of the basics. You can pay for your own water and sanitation. 10 bucks a day, what can you do that makes 10 bucks a day? I started looking into this more, and at the time when I was management consulting, my first client was in outsourcing from a call center. I was sent off to India to help this call center go public, and I was really depressed, 'cause I thought call centers were bad. I was like, oh God, they're taking jobs away from middle America, and reducing economic opportunity. As I dug deeper, I realized that this model, at a larger level, could be really powerful, because digital work can go to places where the markets are really small. Like the woman in Bangladesh, through a computer, can sell her services to someone in the US. She's not limited anymore, she's not constrained to that local market. It was eye-opening. I thought, what if we could train people, in these low income communities, to do digital work for companies all over. By the way, it wouldn't just work in rural Kenya, it could work in rural America, in rural Arkansas, where we actually have a program now. That was the aha moment I had. Over nights and weekends, over a span of two years, I read everything I could about social entrepreneurship. I read every book that Muhammad Yunus had written. I read everything I could about starting a business. I wrote this really shitty business plan on nights and weekends. Pardon my language. No, take it there. Go girl. I found, actually I started submitting my business plan to competitions I found online. I had to hustle to even make money in college. I had three jobs, and I had scholarships, and my parents didn't make any money, so I was used to hustling, and figuring out ways that people would pay me to do stuff. The five to nine, yeah. Exactly, the five to nine. That's why I support the idea of a side hustle, 'cause I did it for two years when I was consulting. Finally, lo and behold, this business plan competition took my business plan and said, okay, we're gonna advance you to the semi-finals, we're gonna fly you to Amsterdam, and you can present your business, and if you place in this awards ceremony, you can get up to 30,000 euros for your business. Which is such a tiny amount of money, but it was enough to get me started. Incredible. I won second place, and with that 22,000 euros, I quit my job and started Samasource. The model was, I would go and find technology companies, that had work that we could do. Things like data entry, like entering business cards into a database, or transcribing audio files. We actually did that for Tim Ferriss, when he was writing one of his books. Amazing. He'd record these audio files, and he needed somebody to transcribe them. And then, on the back end, I would train people in a community in Kenya, from a slum, to do this basic digital work. And you personally went there and trained them? Or you and a small team of people? I went there, and I found an entrepreneur in Kenya, who was running an internet cafe business and failing. He couldn't make enough money to generate the returns to pay for his internet cafe business. I'm like, you have the computers, you have access to local talent, can you train people to do this data entry work? He's like, no problem. Kenya has a large population of people, just like my students in Ghana, who can read and write, who are bright and motivated, but are living on less than two dollars a day, in the most abhorrent conditions, because they simply were born in a place where there's little economic opportunity. Steve Muthee, sadly, he passed away a few years ago, but Steve Muthee was my first business partner, and he was this Kenyan entrepreneur, running this internet cafe, so he was recruiting kids from the slums. Not kids, but 19 year olds, to come and do that work. Kids when you're our age. Kids when our, exactly. The ripe old age of 34. I was doing all the quality assurance myself. I was using Basecamp, this software. They would log in to Basecamp, and I'd send them these files. I found one guy to be my client in the Bay Area. He runs this company called Benitec, and they had this library for blind readers called Bookshare, he needed transcription. I got a $30,000 contract from him. I basically told him, "Look, I will personally" "do the transcription myself," "if these Kenyans can't get it right." Of course, the Kenyans blew it out of the water. They were amazing, they had the best quality, and I would just do the QA, and then I would send it to the client, and that's how we got started. Now, nine years later, we have moved over 8,000 workers and their families, so a total of over 35,000 people, out of poverty. From an average of under two dollars a day, to an average of over $10 dollars a day. What's amazing is that they stay at that level, they stay out of poverty after working with us, because all of a sudden, they get exposed to the digital economy, and the office job, you know, the formal sector. Skills. Skills. So they never go back to where they were before. It's really amazing to see how people are using this income. They're sending their kids to school. We have these incredible stories of people saying their entire life's changed. They move out of the slum, they eat better food. Literally, everything changes when you increase your income 400%. Wow. You cracked a particular nut, but I'm also interested in the trend that you are a part of, and have been a prime mover in, as you said earlier, just the social entrepreneur movement. Talk to us about that at the macro level. I love the detail, you're transcribing, and you're helping low income folks in these low income areas get out. Talk about the ... I think there's a lot of people who want to do good in the world. CreativeLive is a company that's a for profit company, but we have 10 million students all over the world. We don't get the kinds of stories of going from zero, or a dollar or two dollars a day, but total life transformation from four x'ing their income. But I'm really curious, you've done it in a very different way, you've cracked a hard problem. Talk to me about the trend. Is it fluff? Is it real? How would someone, how would you suggest someone who's interested in that, think about it? Yeah. I think it's so real, 'cause I see the data. Cohn Communications released a study a couple of years ago that showed that nine out of 10 millennials are willing to switch brands to one associated with a good cause. Increasingly, these younger consumers are becoming savvy about which causes are fluff, and which are real. Yeah, and also which are well run. Totally. What you see. I remember being friends with Neil Blumenthal, who's one of the co-founders of Warby Parker. Before he started Warby Parker, he was the CEO of a non-profit called VisionSpring, which was a really innovative non-profit, that was helping people get access to eyeglasses. Not by handouts, not by giving them eyeglasses, but by training local entrepreneurs to sell eyeglass kits, and teach them how to repair broken eyeglasses. It was a give work kind of model, an employment model that also solved the problem of glasses, and then he went on to start Warby Parker, which is now the single biggest donor to VisionSpring. It's an amazing model, they're a B corporation, they're outstanding in so many ways. Millennials love brands like Warby Parker, because it's not fluff. It's not like their just writing a check to some non-profit that's not affiliated, it's core to their business to provide sight for as many people as possible. People love the idea that they're voting with their dollars. Especially, I think, when you feel disempowered politically, people realize that maybe they can make the change they wanna see in the world outside of politics, in the way that they purchase and consume, and for the companies that they work for. That's such a powerful lever that most people don't realize that they have that in their, at their disposal. Totally. We don't even think about ... So, our mission at Sama is to change the way that corporations spend their money. Imagine if the corporate budgets that go into catering, and even employee swag, and all the stuff that companies buy. Imagine if they purchased from social enterprises. Imagine if they purchased from vendors that address poverty. There are organizations in this country that are hiring people from reentry populations. People just leaving prison to make jeans, to make sweatshirts. Why wouldn't you wanna do that, if you're in charge of procurement at a company, and you have to buy corporate swag for your employees, why wouldn't you choose to buy from the non-profit that's employing people who are down on their luck. I feel like this is a huge movement, and we're just starting to see that these two worlds that we thought were so different. The world of social impact, and all this non-profit stuff, and the world of profit maximizing business. We're starting to see all of these links between the two. And realizing that we can't just push social impact to nights and weekends and to non-profits. We have to embed it in the way that we run our companies. So powerful. I love ... I feel like you also touched on something there, which is that we're at the front end of this. Even the concept, the phrase, social entrepreneurship, is like what? Five years old, 10 years old? Totally new. You've been doing this for nine years, Maybe 10 years. Did you have a name for it when you started it? Was it called that? No, I think it was called ... Muhammad Yunus was calling it social business, but I mean, very early days. That's huge, it's a movement, and to be so early on, where do you see Samasource going from here? Is it just gonna continue to grow and ... I know at least one thing you brought back to rural Arkansas, you said. Give us the, what's the thousand foot view? Sure. Right now in this country, it blows my mind, that, if you just look at how government is spending its money. Government is a big purchaser of goods and services. Why aren't there requirements that city governments purchase from social enterprises? Right? We have a huge problem with prisons in this country. We incarcerate way too many people for nonviolent drug offenses. Once you get incarcerated, it becomes incredibly difficult to be a productive member of society, and contribute to the economy. Lots of data there. Lots of data. I think there should be incentives for companies that are willing to hire people who are coming out of prison for nonviolent drug offenders, because you're preventing that person from being on welfare, you're preventing that person from being a burden to the taxpayer. You're getting that person into a productive job. We don't do any of that now. It's shocking to me. We don't incentivize the kind of society we wanna create. I think there is, for Sama, such a huge opportunity to show the world that the model that we used to build Samasource can be used in other industries. I'm writing a book that, well, I just finished writing it. It's coming out in September. So cool. I can't wait. Make sure that I get an advance copy, pretty please. Definitely. I love it. Definitely, your name is on it. It's called Give Work, and the idea behind Give Work is what if we could shift one percent of the budget that companies spend on goods and services, their procurement budget, to sourcing from social enterprises that give work to low income people? It doesn't have to be people in Africa. It can be people right here. I met with the CEO of Levi's recently, and Levi's is now sourcing a percentage of their denim from a non-profit factory in Texas, that employs military veterans, and people who are low income to make jeans. Why wouldn't you pay 10 bucks more for that pair of jeans, that is helping someone who's served your country? I think that this is gonna become a movement, a give work movement, and we wanna build a pledge system, where companies can pledge to at least spend one percent of their procurement budget. Like one percent for the planet? I love this. Exactly. One percent to give work. It can be local, and it can be international. By doing that, those companies are actively solving the problems that would otherwise be outsourced to philanthropy. Instead of just cutting a check, a percentage of profits, and donating it, why not embed that social impact in the way that you're working every day. I talked to so many CEOs who were like, this is easy, I'm already spending the money, I might as well spend it on a vendor that's doing good. I think that's the vision, that's the future. Wow. There's so many things I wanna talk about. I'm putting pins in these things. This is my job, not yours. I'm winching here. I wanna talk about five different things. I wanna go back, before I go to how companies can get effect ... Or be more effective, and some of the ways that we can support your book, and further your vision. I wanna go back to the decision of how you figured out what to do. Like business plan competition. Did you analyze ... You said you read everything you could. Again, I'm going back to the mind and the hearts and the souls of the people who are listening and watching. There are so many people who are in your shoes. Can you give them some sort of categorical advice on how to get started? Totally. Okay. The brain learns through pattern recognition. That's how kids learn. That's actually how machines learn as well. One of the most important things, I think, is to surround yourself with examples of what you wanna do. The best way to learn, is to find people who are doing similar things, and follow them. Follow them on social media. Now, because of Instagram and Facebook, and all of these tools we have to follow people's daily lives, you can learn so much more from example, than you could before. When I was starting Sama, it's hard to believe, but that was right when Twitter was getting started, so we didn't have a lot of these examples, in real time, and you couldn't follow someone's journey the same way you can now. I read a lot of biographies. I read Muhammad Yunus's books. I read biographies of a lot of women who inspired me. There is such a lack, sadly, of stories about women entrepreneurs, but I tried to find the ones I could. I looked at their behaviors, and I was like, how can I model myself after this person, or that person? I tried to meet as many inspiring leaders and CEOs as I could. I remember I once met Howard Schultz, and I picked his brain, and he sent me four of his recommended books, and I poured through them, and I flagged every page, and highlighted them. It really was a learning exercise for me. I got tons of stuff wrong. So I think the other thing is just to realize that you're bound to make mistakes, and nothing's gonna be perfect, as you're building something. The concept that it's linear. I think that's what people think. I have to go here, here, here, here. Also, the thinking and the planning gets in the way of the doing. I heard from you is, I injected yourself into communities, you created it where there wasn't one, you modeled behavior after the people that you saw doing the things that you liked. You were ravenous with respect to the material that you could gain, get on the topic. All of those things are actions. It's a lot less cerebral, and a lot more physical. Sure, you were reading books, but there's the action of sitting down and making time for the reading. Do you see that? I've seen you speak, and I've always seen long lines of people wanting to talk to you when you get off stage. Is that some of the questions they ask, when you get off stage? Yeah, like how do you start? How did you get connected to the people you got connected to? I think one of the things that I learned is that, you'd be surprised at how many people will respond, if you directly message them. Even if it's one out of every 100 people, that one person might be, in my case it was Reid Hoffman. I actually sent Reid Hoffman a cold in mail on LinkedIn. By the way, if you don't know, Reid is the founder of LinkedIn. Billionaire, he's actually an investor here in CreativeLive. He's an amazing human. Tech mogul, amazing human. PayPal. He was part of the early PayPal mafia. Legend. And then he was on the board of Kiva, which is a peer-to-peer microfinance platform that I really respect, and I had followed his journey there, and I always felt like he was a kindred spirit. I literally sent him an in mail. I was like, you know Reid, I saw that you just made this huge donation to Kiva, would you donate to Samasource? Here's what I'm doing, and he basically was like, okay, I'm not gonna write you a check, but I'll take a meeting with you. Lo and behold, a billionaire said yes to an ask that I had. At that point, Sama was tiny, we had no cachet, I was not speaking everywhere. That was just like hustle. I think that a lot of the time, we block ourselves from doing that sort of thing, 'cause we're embarrassed, or we think, Reid Hoffman's never gonna wanna hear from me. But the Reid Hoffman's of the world wanna hear about good ideas. When I get approached by someone with a great idea, maybe I can't respond to every email, but once in a while, I'll be like, "Yeah, I'll meet with you, I'll spend 15 minutes." A lot of successful entrepreneurs do things like Facebook Live, or they have Twitter accounts, and you can direct message them or tweet at them. There's so many ways to get in touch with leaders who inspire you, and for me, that was the most powerful way to learn how to create a business and get started. Incredible. I just love the start. We categorize people. People we've already identified as creative or entrepreneur, or the people who want to, and in this people who want to category, there's, like you said, they're their own worst blocker. Because it's the paralysis of having to get it right, and having to know all the things. No one who starts knows all of the things. You can't. You can't, all of the things is not knowable. Tell me a little bit about the US stuff. I didn't know that you had a program here in the US. Yeah, we launched ... Actually, it's a funny story how it started. I told Tim this story. We had these ads running on Hulu in 2009, that were using footage from a refugee camp, and it's a tragic story. There's a refugee camp called Dadaab in Kenya, that has, had at its peak, 900,000 Somali refugees, caught in no man's land. We had done a program there, and the refugees were able to work for Microsoft, from the camp. Mind blowing. So I made a little video about it, with really bad footage, and it was running on Hulu, and this guy wrote me this email that was like, you are ruining America. You are stealing our jobs and sending them to Africans. I was so heartbroken from this email, because Sama's a non-profit so I couldn't, I can't sell it, I have no equity in it, I'm not making money off of this. I'm doing it because I wanna help solve this horrific refugee and poverty problem. I immediately dashed off this nasty response to the guy, and then, I didn't send it. The best piece of advice I've ever received is to never send an angry email, to sleep on it. So smart. I slept on it, and the next morning, I was like, let me take a different tack. I wrote back and I was like, "Dear Joe, I understand why you might be frustrated." The recession had just started, it was 2009. I was like, "We're losing a lot of jobs in America." "Do you have any ideas for us on how" "we could do something in the US?" "Maybe there's some way." He wrote back the nicest response. He was like, "Thank you so much for listening." "I'm sorry I was harsh." "I just lost my job and I live in Ohio." "We've lost tons of manufacturing," "because companies are just looking for a quick buck." It was this incredibly, emotionally, thoughtful response. Not normal. This was not on YouTube. This was not on YouTube, but this was a lesson to me, that sometimes when people are angry, you just need to listen to them. The best advice. I think even, politically, we are in such a divisive place, precisely because we're not listening to the other side, and we're not being empathetic. Anyway, that inspired us years later, to start a US program. We started in rural Arkansas, because we had some connections to the Arkansas Economic Development Council, that was really keen to bring jobs to this really low income part of the country, the Mississippi River Delta, which is historically one of the poorest places in America. It's got a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. People still make their living doing seasonal cotton picking. There are major educational gaps there. We decided to start a pilot in the middle of the Delta. The idea was that we would train people to learn how to be successful on new online platforms for work. Upwork is a good example. Now you can make money from your own home, even if you live in a trailer in the middle of the Mississippi River Delta. You can make money doing things like data entry, or virtual assistants for a company in Los Angeles or New York. You have a competitive advantage if you live in a place where the cost of living is a tenth of what it is in San Francisco. That was the premise, and we started it in 2012, and it's called Samaschool. We've now trained over 30,000 people around the world, including in the US, in digital work skills that they can apply, working from home. These are like digital freelancing skills. We have a social media marketing class. We have a lot of people who are now making money running social media for businesses remotely. We train them in things like community management. This is another growing field. Lots of companies are looking to hire people to go and respond to Facebook comments on their brand, or figure out what people are saying about their brand. There are all these new ways to make money through the internet. Sadly, none of the federally sponsored job training programs are focused on that, the government's like 10 years behind in job training. We're the first job training program that's teaching people to leverage the digital economy. Let's get tactical for a second. What if the folks on the other end of this broadcast, or recording, or visual editors, there are many ways to consume this. How would you prescribe them get involved in what you're doing? Sure. They can take the Samaschool classes, they're free. They're really designed to help you get a leg in the digital economy immediately. The other thing you can do, probably for your audience, is think about this kind of a model. Maybe you and your community can train people to do community management from your hometown. You can build a social media marketing agency. Now, I think it's actually one of the fastest growing sectors. Every consumer brand needs community management people, and it's one of the things that builds the most brand equity. It's hard when you're getting started to afford a full-time resource, so if you can build a small agency. You can make tons of money doing that as a freelancer. It is a big area of growth for a lot of small and medium agencies to do that. Solopreneurs, I know a handful of people that do that for half a dozen companies, and if you piece together, make a pretty substantial amount of money doing something like that. Absolutely. And you can work from anywhere. And you can also learn a lot of the tools around community management online. So you can teach yourself how to do it, run your business, get paid, all virtually. You can live in a beautiful place in the Mississippi River Delta that costs like 10 grand a year, instead of 100 grand a year. There was an article in ... Gosh, where was it, recently, a Twitter engineer getting paid 160K, was winging about the absurd prices in San Francisco, it's crazy. It's nuts. Frankly, I don't know why people but, we try to build our teams remotely, as much as possible. I'm actually looking at maybe switching my home base to Florida, 'cause it just makes so much more economic sense. I just feel like we're paying a premium right now for the cost of living in the Bay. This is the beauty of the internet. No longer are we constrained by where we happen to live. We can work for anyone, from anywhere, if we understand how to use that. I think that's another great takeaway. Embedded in the Samasource story, is this opportunity. It's the first time in the history of the world where we can transcend not only economic boundaries, but geographic, social, cultural, with the internet. That's such an amazing job. I love it. We're just at the beginning. I feel like we're ... Mark Zuckerberg always has this great quote, we're one percent of the way there. I feel like we're one tenth of one percent of the way there. And that equals nine years. (laughing) Tell me the story that you were sharing with me just a second ago. I love that about, you're nine years into Samasource. Yeah. And you feel like you're just getting started. You also felt like you'd been doing it for awhile. God, a long time. Since I was 25. Hard to imagine. But you also ... What was the story you just shared about, you were sort of, ho-humming about, grinding for nine years. You're profitable now. You've got Samasource headed in the direction you wanted it to. Wasn't there someone that was saying, "Oh girl, you're just getting started." Yes. What was that? It was such a good story. We became profitable last year, after nine years, we finally crossed 10 million in sales, and we now have 1200 full-time agents who work for us, and the model's working. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get there. You look great, by the way. Thank you. You look great. Thank you, it's make-up. I was meeting with the CEO of TomTom, a guy named Harold, who's based in Amsterdam. TomTom we know from the GPS navigation devices, but they actually now, they're big business is mapping data. They sell mapping data, I think, to the Googles and the Ubers of the world. They're a big public company. Beautiful, fancy offices, and I was telling him this story, and I was like, "It took us nine years to be profitable." "Not like TomTom, I mean," "you guys were such an early success." He looked at me, and he's like, "Are you kidding?" He's like, "For 11 years, we never crossed" "two and a half million in sales." 11 years. He and his wife started the business. He said, "We were just grinding away." "We were trying all these different things." "None of them were working, and then, finally," "we came up with the idea of building" "a GPS navigation device." "We did that, and finally, after 11 years," "of being two to three million in sales, we hit 40 million." And then the year after that, it was over 100 million. He said, "But it took me 11 years to get to this point." "If I had quit at any point along the way," "I never would've taken this company public." I think that's a huge aspect of building anything. Whether you're talking about a product, or just as an entrepreneur for business. Grit is the thing that I talk about. Do you feel like that's what he's talking about? Absolutely, grit and resilience. I think the only thing that separates great entrepreneurs from failed entrepreneurs, is an ability to not quit. It's not magic dust? It's not raw talent? It's not raw talent, it's not magic dust. I think it does take a certain kind of talent to not quit. I think you have to be so committed, and almost like a missionary for what you believe in, but I really don't think it's ... I like to think ... It's easy to think that, oh, that person was born with some special skill set. Or Steve Jobs is a creative, brilliant genius. He probably was, but so many entrepreneurs just got where they are because they stuck through the tough times. So true. Wise one. Wise. I don't know, talk to me in five years. Maybe when I'm penniless and homeless in San Francisco, I'll feel differently. To that end, you've started another business. You told me this, I think when I saw you in New York. Was it maybe at Founder's Forum, or something like that? You're like, "I gotta tell you," "I started another business." It's like, what? Like double CEO duty here? Yeah, 'cause I like pain. I don't recommend it, but Sama's now much more mature, and I created a new business called LXMI. L-X-M-I, lxmi.com. We are aiming to be ... CNBC called us two weeks ago, "The Chanel of social impact." Oh! Did you coin that and feed it to 'em, or was that theirs? I mentioned it, and then they were like, "Oh", and then they put that as the headline, so it was awesome. Well played. I don't know how Chanel feels about this. Chanel right now is like, dagger. But basically, I looked at the Samasource model, this give work model, and there are all these interesting social enterprise models now that hire prisoners, and low income people, and women in developing countries who've been sex trafficked. All these marginalized populations. There's nobody doing that in the luxury space. If you think about how much money we spend on silly luxury goods, frankly. I was spending, you know, I always splurged on one thing, which was skin cream. My mom always taught me that you gotta make sure that you invest in your face, you only have one face. Buy the most expensive skin cream you can afford. A lot of my girlfriends, similarly, they might be broke, but they will spend $ on a really nice jar of Le Mar or Chanel skin cream. I started doing more digging and realizing that a lot of these very popular, expensive skin creams are petroleum based. Have ingredients like yellow number seven, and red number five in them. Why would I want to put a Skittle on my face? That have toxic emulsifiers, and all kinds of nasty stuff in them. There's such an opportunity to me to build a product that's good for you, the consumer, and good for the world, but that's appealing to a luxury consumer. With beautiful packaging, amazing branding. Imagine if you had a product that looked as beautiful as a Chanel product, but that was actually good for you, and good for the world. It's high time we had that. Yeah, sign me up. Right? We spend so much on luxury goods, and they're such high margin businesses, usually, that you can afford, if you're charging $ for a skin cream, you can afford to bake into your economic model, social good. You can afford to pay living wages to people in a developing country to produce the raw ingredient. You can afford to source from the fair trade factory. You can afford to make packaging that's more expensive, but ethically produced. It's the kind of business model that supports social impact, I think, or should. That's the vision of LXMI. We started with skin care, because we have access to amazing raw ingredients from northern Uganda, so we source from women who are mostly war widows. There was a horrific civil war in Uganda that, Invisible Children made a documentary about it. Good film. Killed lots of young children as child soldiers, and this community's now struggling to recover from that war, so the best thing we can do for them, is not to give them handouts, it's to purchase things from them, and pay them fair wages. We purchase a rare type of shea butter called nilotica, that's amazing for the skin. It's literally, I think it's the best thing you could possibly put on your skin. It's a super food, packed with vitamins A and E. And, by purchasing this product, we sell it, we call it Pure Nilotica Melt, we sell it raw at Sephora. We're the first social impact brand to sell at Sephora. You told me that before we started recording, that's huge, there's 300 stores or something? 300 stores, yeah. I mean, it's a tough business, so we'll see how that goes. We launched in Sephora, we launched on QVC. We're about to launch with Ipsy this summer, and we sell it on our site. I think it's amazing that now, you can buy a product that really, the packaging looks super high-end and luxe, it's beautiful on a counter next to your favorite luxury product, but it's actually really good for the world. It's fair trade certified. It's organic certified. You could literally eat the product, if you were in a pinch, and it would be great for you. Wow. Was it just because you saw the high margin, and you saw what you built in Samasource, you put those two things together? Or, what was the impetus? What was the moment? Was there a spark, or was it a five year spark? Five year overnight success? I'd been thinking this for awhile. I wanted to start Sama Beauty, I was calling it. I have a real problem as an entrepreneur, which a lot of entrepreneurs have, which is I get excited by ideas. I have 80 domain names, in my GoDaddy account. Kate, if you're watching this, this is my wife. See? See? She's like, am I seriously renewing 125 of these things again? Is this real life? Thank you for making me feel good about myself for a second. But now back to you. It is a problem, though, right? Chasing a lot of shiny things. Chasing a lot of shiny things, and if you ... Entrepreneurs are by nature, we are optimists, because we will something that didn't exist into existence, which means that you have to have an unshakable kind of optimism. Which means, that you're probably optimistic about too many things, right? So I had these, so many different Sama ideas. I wanted to make Sama the virgin of social enterprise, the virgin group of social enterprise, and do Sama this, and Sama that, and Sama food, and Sama beauty, I have all those domains. I was thinking about this, and then, I was in northern Uganda, 'cause we have a Samasource facility there that employs low income women, and I was walking around in a local market, and I came across this nilotica product, in a raw form, in a little tub. I put it on, I was like, wow, this stuff is amazing. I started doing more research, and realized that nobody had really created a luxury brand around it. It'd been exported a little bit, you could find it on Amazon, but no one, I thought, was doing justice to the powerful story of where this comes from, which is the most pristine, stunning region on Earth that actually grows wild, on trees, on the banks of the Nile River, where the Nile River originates in Uganda. You couldn't think of a more perfect story for a skin care ingredient than this luscious region. The wheels started turning, and then I approached my board with Samasource and I said, "Can we start a beauty line?" They were like, "Why don't you start that as a separate company?" "You have our blessing." I donated a third of my personal equity to the non-profit. If LXMI ever does really really well, the non-profit will get a nice chunk of cash, it's basically a co-founder in the business. I set it up as a separate company. Wow, fascinating. So, we'll see how it goes. It's really exciting, and I'm excited to take the give work model into a consumer brand. 'Cause I think we can generate so much more awareness of our mission that way. You have insights that you can share through the story of the new product, and not only inspire, or empower, excite, create the movement for the consumer, but inspire other entrepreneurs too. I love the ... It's like there's a flywheel that you've started, with the core idea, the things that you've uncovered. I know that you're gonna keep spinning off more things. I gotta go. It's A, dangerous, but B, I gotta go back to a comment that you said. I'm curious as hell. QVC, that shit it ... It's crazy. I mean, it's a huge business. I'm dying to know what it's like, you're on? You're on QVC, you have the product on there? Yeah, and I just sold it last week on air. You did? Yeah. Was it amazing, or weird, or both? It's so surreal. Any company that measures revenue by the minute, is doing pretty well. It has a big, red ticker, like that clock right there, isn't it? Yeah, and you have an earpiece, and it's ama ... I'd seen the movie Joy. Yes. Last year. I loved that movie. I was like, QVC would be so amazing. Figured out through one of my board members that I had a connection, and so she put us in email touch. I managed to get a pitch meeting. Our CMO, who's really like my business partner in LXMI, she was five months pregnant at the time, and she drove down from her house in New York, and I flew in, and we decided that we would focus the pitch on the fact that our raw ingredient was safe enough to eat. How many skin care ingredients, that are really effective, can you say that about? We decided we would make chocolates out of the raw ingredient, and serve the chocolates at the meeting. Thea, five months pregnant, was the night before, whipping up some truffles in her kitchen with nilotica. We showed up to the meeting, we opened this little box, and we're like, "Oh here, we brought you guys some chocolates." As we're eating the chocolates, I was like, "Guess what?" "You are eating the product that I wanna sell on air." I took it out and I ate it from the jar. I was like, "This is pure nilotica melt," "this is a single ingredient, certified organic," "fair trade product, that is better for you" "than all of these petroleum based things" "that women are buying and spending $100 an ounce on." "This is the purest, best thing you can put on your skin," "and it's also good for the world." "I wanna expose American to this product." They were like, (snaps fingers), sold. (laughing) I'm buying it. My skin, I need a lot of help here, but my God. Incredible. It's just funny how those ... I think it's ... I looked at that movie Joy, and I was like, how did she do it? It's funny how those examples, those real world examples can inspire us. Anyway, it's still a very long and tough journey ahead. We are, by no means, a hugely successful brand, we're just starting out. But just to have that opportunity to sell on air is amazing. Incredible story. The article in the New York Times that came out on Sunday. It talked a lot about, there's this undercurrent. I think you've done such a nice job of reminding the folks at home, because, I just made a video a couple of days ago about, if you're sitting at home in your underwear in Ohio, and you're watching this right now, and going, oh my God, how am I going to do it. You think you wanna be just like you. Or just like this other inspirational character online, or X, Y or Z. What you have to do, is be a little bit you, a lot of you, and take little bits from these other things, but what you have done, I think, you have created inspiration around your ideas, but you also, it's been a real undercurrent in this interview, and in the New York Times, which is what I want you to talk about, is that it's hard. That shit it doesn't look like, it's not a TV series, it's not a two-week sprint, and then you're famous. It's not an overnight success. So can you fill in, just give us the arc of the story of the New York Times, and then talk to me, and we're really talking to the people who are listening and watching, about how, that's why you should chase something you care about, is because shit's gonna get hard, and when it does, you have to be there. Totally. I think there's an in-built advantage to mission driven companies, which is that at the end of the day, even if you fail, you're doing something that is worthwhile that is aligned with your values. It's like, even if it doesn't make you money, you're still gonna go to church, you're still gonna go show up at the PTA meetings, because you care about it, and you care about it for reasons other than financial gain. That, ultimately, tides you through when the going gets rough, because you feel like you're doing something that's noble, and that has a purpose. The why. The why, yeah. I guess the Times piece was about, it was about resilience and getting through tough times, and I had, my parents had a really tough personal life, and there was a lot of chaos in my house growing up, and part of the reason that I went to Africa, is that I wanted to escape that. It's interesting that now there are all these studies coming out about childhood adversity, that show that adverse experiences can actually build resilience and grit, and can make you stronger, and can give you a super power. They also might require you to have a lot of therapy, and need to meditate and do other things to kind of, I think, balance you out, 'cause along with those gifts, you can inherit challenges and problems. I do think there's overwhelming evidence that we can turn really tough situations into opportunities and strengths. Sheryl Sandberg has this new book that just came out called Option B, about how life can throw you lemons, and it's really about how you choose to act in those moments that demonstrate your character. Often, there are so many things that can happen that are beyond our control, that are really shitty, that really suck, and they happen all the time to entrepreneurs. The Times piece was just about how I don't think I'm especially gifted at anything, other than just going when it gets really hard. Force of nature. Again, the stamina piece. Embedded in that answer, you said things like, whether you go to therapy or meditate. I felt like there were some other things that you could say in that place. You were telling a story or part of a narrative arc, but let's go back and excerpt that for a second. How do you manage all that stuff? Is it all of those things? Is it more? Talk to me about that, and again, the people at home wanna know, 'cause it helps them feel okay about. There's so much, there's so much that happens in the world, where people are comparing their actual life with the highlight reels, i.e., social media, of others, and that comparison often creates a lot of anxiety and pain, where the hope would be that it would inspire and cultivate. I always ask my guests, talk to me about some shit that's hard, and how you overcome it. What are your medicines? I'm happy to share this, 'cause I don't think we talk enough about it, and I think people view entrepreneurs as like, this person is superhuman, they're able to just do this, and they have such a happy, glamorous life, because they just see the highlight reel on Facebook, and no one posts the shitty moments on Facebook. When I was in college, my college roommate committed suicide. It was the same year that a family member took her own life. It was the same year that I was working three jobs, because my parents didn't have money. They'd gone through this really horrible divorce. My dad, at one point, was living in an RV. It was not glamorous. I struggled with depression for a lot of my 20s, and some really low lows. Low enough that I didn't think I was gonna make it. I, thankfully, discovered two things that changed my life. Therapy and meditation. I will be vocal about it, 'cause I don't think enough people talk about it, but I think that we absolutely have to build these sorts of tools, more into everyday life. If you're trying to get better at throwing a baseball or running, you hire a coach. It's normal to have coaching for -- Sports or trainers or all of those things. Totally. There's still a lot of taboo around having a trainer for your brain, and that's the most important thing you have. It is. It's your biggest asset. I actually went through some real management difficulties, when I was launching Sama, because I had this battlefield mentality, from a lot of tough experiences in childhood, and coming through college, so I had this warrior mentality that I'm bringing to the office, and create arguments with my team, and not be the most empathetic manager. It took a lot of, I think, hard lessons learned, a lot of people basically telling me, "You're a terrible manager, you need to change your style." For me to finally realize that I should see a coach. I started, I did executive coaching, I did therapy, even when I couldn't afford it, I found low income, therapists who would take on lower income people, when I was struggling at the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey. I just cannot stress enough how important that is. The discussion, to be able to see someone as successful and together as you are, that you've gone through that, I appreciate the sharing. I think it's so helpful. Yeah, it's so true. Can you talk to me also about the meditation, because it's coaching, and low income coaching is still pretty expensive. But talk to me about meditation. Absolutely. So I read a bunch of books on Buddhist meditation, and there's a great book by Pema Chodron, that really helped me, it's called Buddhist Wisdom for Hard Times, or something like that. Basically, a lot of the concepts of Buddhism, which are very similar to a lot of the readings that I've, like what Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, from the Catholic tradition, have said about Catholicism. At the end of the day, a lot of the world's great religions say the same thing, which is that it's important to have contemplative time, to reflect on the fact that the world is much bigger than just you, and that actually, the idea that we're separate is kind of an illusion. We are all part of a bigger scheme of life. If you reflect on that, and realize that okay, my struggle today is actually not that important, because I'm part of this, I'm basically, inextricably intertwined with this person who's really succeeding, and with the person I'm in a difficult relationship with, and with the person I'm managing, who I'm struggling with. We're all part of the same being in a way. If you zoom out enough, and realize that you're just a tiny piece in a larger hole, that can be a very cathartic feeling. Especially if your mind is so caught up in your current struggle. The ego around that struggle. So much ego, and I think the Buddhist tradition does a really nice job of dealing with ego. Gotta park that stuff, but sorry. Absolutely. No, and it's free. It's a free tool, you can use it at any time. A lot of those readings helped me. I started meditating. I try to meditate, even if it's 10 minutes a day. I started going to church. I've started going to Glide, here in San Francisco, and I feel like for a lot of people, prayer can be that form of meditation. It's not about the religious tradition, it's about finding that quiet, contemplative time, to reflect on the fact that you are not alone, that you are part of a universe that is really, in many ways, a single whole. That can just be so heartwarming, when you feel isolated and alone. It is. Any habits that you would recommend, or that you've adopted in your course of taking care of yourself, and that help with maximum performance? This sounds so cheesy, but when I'm really struggling, and I'm feeling really low, even writing down 10 things that I am grateful for, that I feel like are gifts in my life. Once I literally wrote down, "My hair is actually pretty good," "I feel good about the way my hair looks." I love it. It sounds so cheesy, but I was like, okay, this is one thing, even when the shit is hitting the fan, I can feel good about my hair. I wrote once about my dad, who's just like, we struggled in our relationship sometimes, but I just know that he will always be there, and he has this essentially, deeply kind heart, and so just reflecting on whatever gifts they might be. I don't know what it might be, your cat. The fact that you have a car that you liked that doesn't break down. Whatever it might be, but there's all this evidence now that shows that when you focus your brain on thoughts around gratitude, you can get out of that funk. There's even a special meditation that Buddhists do called tonglen meditation, which involves literally visualizing that you are inhaling the pain of someone else. It can be a particular person, or a group of people. So maybe you're thinking about your aunt who has cancer or something. You literally visualize it. You're inhaling her pain with every in-breath, and exhaling warmth and compassion, and transforming that pain in your heart into warmth and compassion. This sounds so cheesy and new agey, I know. It doesn't. But it works. It totally works. If you do that for five minutes, whatever situation you might be in, you feel instantly better. It's like a drug. So tonglen is really helpful. It's free and available also. That's one of the things Tim Ferriss, a mutual friend of ours, the person who introduced us, I remember this now. He studied, in Tools of Titans, the number one thread that connected the 200 people, that he sat down with, in this conversation, was meditation, some form of mindfulness. Does not surprise me that that is correlated so highly with high performers. Anything else? Any other habits? I love the gratitude, meditation. Anything else? Therapy. Therapy. I also think that physical expressions of frustration can be really helpful. Sometimes, I just need to run out my problem. Go and run really hard for 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, and just get it out. I think everyone can relate to that feeling of needing to punch a wall sometimes. Sometimes, the only expression that works for me, is physical, and even going to a dance class or something, but definitely something that has rhythm, where I feel like there's impact. Physicality, I grew up as an athlete, and I can either use it to get out of a funk, or use it to never get in one, and the choice is mine. You know what I mean? If I'm exercising every day, it provides this sort of inner strength, and I realize that there is a correlation, if I'm not doing, not taking care of myself, and in this case, the physicality part, that I just tend to be in a funk more often. That's super helpful. Thank you for sharing those things. The story that is the arc of your life is incredible. I feel so lucky to have you. Congrats on the major New York Times piece, that's stunning. Thank you. Before we go, I wanna tap into the new book that's coming out. I might beg you to come back on the show, when it's actually dropping in September. For folks at home, give us the preview. It's called ... Give Work. Give Work. It should be out in September. Is it your whole story? Or is it a how-to guide? Give us a little bit of context. It's a mix of the story of founding Sama and getting through that struggle, and also, a call to action around changing the way that we think about poverty, and how to fix it. From a handout mentality, to an empowering, give work mentality. Leila, I thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. With that, where can the people find you? What's your coordinates? I'm leilajanah.com. And I'm leilajan -- L-I-E -- L-E-I-L-A. L-E-I-L-A. J-A-N-A-H. And I'm on Facebook, social media. I do Facebook Live, office hours every Sunday. Every Sunday, nice. Every Sunday, I try to. I probably need to change that to a different day of the week, to not be stressed out on Sunday. Well, thank you so much for comin'. Super, super excited My pleasure. to have you, and with that, I'll see you again, probably, tomorrow. (inspirational music)

Ratings and Reviews

Dream Focus Studio
 

By far the best classes on Creative Live!! Thanks Chase Jarvis for bringing so much greatness to the table for discussion! Just LOVE it!

René Vidal
 

@ChaseJarvis - love chat with Gabby about hope and the "relentless optimism" you share at the end of Creative Calling. Many thanks. -- René Vidal McKendree Tennis

bob
 

Excellent interview with thoughtful questions. Thanks!!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES